PHOENIX

a new film by S.P. Somtow
now in production

THE OPERA WAS LOST …
BUT THE PHANTOMS ARE REAL

It’s a fast-paced thriller — and a quirky, creative art film.  The Phoenix has been created to appeal to horror fans and intellectuals alike.

A mysterious Italian manuscript is found by an archaeological team excavating an ancient site in the ruins of Ayuthaya.  It appears to be a lost opera by 17th-Century Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli.   The opera deals with the myth of La Fenice, the phoenix, a legend common to Europe and Asia, the story of the firebird that bursts into flame and is reborn from its own ashes.  Even more peculiar is that the plot of this opera is also influenced by the Thai myth of the Kinaree.  The academic world is about to be turned upside down by this discovery.

But what malevolent spirit haunts this manuscript?  When Thai musicians who try to perform this work die fiery deaths, an Italian musician must team up with a Thai shamaness to trace a mysterious four-hundred-year-old link between the opera in Venice and the ancient courts of Siam.  

The ghost of an angry opera singer has been unleashed, and the conductor and the shamaness but cross a dimensional doorway to enter a dream world, a nightmarish evocation of a Venetian carnival, to uncover the horrifying origin of the manuscript and face the fearsome flames of a burning opera house in 17th-Century Venice.

Writer-director S.P. Somtow juggles two intense timelines and two horror stories in The Phoenix — the mysterious entanglement between a young Siamese woman and an Italian musician in 17th Century Venice — and contemporary Italian musicologist and a Thai shamaness who alone carries the secret of the cursed manuscript.  Climaxing simultaneously in a Venetian masquerade and a Thai masked drama, the two stories race toward a fiery climax of death and rebirth.

Created by a multiple award-winning team, The Phoenix is a horror-thriller film, but also a profoundly philosophical piece about the clash of cultures, about the nature of artistic vision, and about the fire of passion and revenge.